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Vincent Longo was Katjanelson’s MFA thesis advisor at Hunter College. Whether this association was serendipitous or designed, it was well timed. Katjanelson’s priorities were perfectly aligned with Longo’s aesthetics. A master printmaker, Longo was a professor at Hunter from 1967 to 2001. Longo arrived at abstraction through his study of the meditative qualities of the mandala, Jung’s writings on symbolism and creation myths, and Taoism. He stated that his overarching interest was in “archetypal patterns and habits of design that seem to project or fortify inner-directed matter and feeling”, an ethos that reinforced Katjanelson’s interest in binary ideas.
Katjanelson’s prints are often unsigned and undated. It is, therefore, sometimes difficult to ascribe a definite chronology to her many lithographic and off-set photographic series. She was particularly prolific, if not obsessive in her production of grid-based prints. Like Longo, she was concerned with the idea of entropy. She states: “The image that is first used to record the recurrent beat of some barely audible wasp wing [is] replaced by a complete disinterest in content. …I had to find an image that would allow my eyes to rest, to settle and be transfixed.” Both Longo and Katjanelson used a grid structure that radiates from the center rather than the edge, and thus implies expansion. Her constellations of dots are not simply symmetrical patterns. She also instills a quietly human aspect to the regularized field through her use of marks that are often slightly gestural, and thus a bit unpredictable.
Like Longo, Katjanelson sought a balance between disintegration and equilibrium. The viewer scans what is expected to be a regularized pattern, but hesitates when confronted with the irregularities of touch. The resulting tension between these opposing systems renders a kind of nervous energy. The eye assumes regularity, but is met with minute adjustments of color and rhythm. It is the interstices between the mark and the field that concern Katjanelson most.